KEYNOTE
Prof Claire Taylor
Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool
Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool
A specialist in Latin American culture, Claire's Taylor's research topics include women's writing in Latin America, and Latin(o) American digital culture. Her work focuses on the varied literary and cultural genres being developed online by Latin(o) Americans, with a particular interest in hypertext novels, e-poetry and net art. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on these topics, and is the co-author of the recent volume Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production (New York: Routledge, 2012), and author of the recent monograph Place and Politics in Latin America Digital Culture: Location and Latin American Net Art (New York: Routledge, 2014). She is currently holder of an AHRC Follow-On Funding grant for her project on Latin(o) American Digital Art, in which she is running a series of impact and engagement events, and writing up a book entitled Cities in Dialogue (LUP 2015, forthcoming). |
Keynote: 'Contagion, Social Networks, and Digital Art as Contestation'
This paper proposes to explore internet-based works by Latin American artists as exemplifying approaches to contagion and containment insofar as these terms relate to social networks, technological innovations, financial contagion, and neoliberalism. The paper explores how the work of Latin(o) American digital artists allows for ways of thinking through the flows (of capital, people and goods) underpinning neoliberalism, and provides a partial contestation of neoliberalism through the very tools that are often seen to uphold it. Exploring the interface between the technological and the affective, the paper takes as case studies firstly the works of Uruguayan artist Brian Mackern, and his critique of the post-crash neoliberal era in his pieces collected in 34s56w.org, analysing how Mackern engages in the production of affective maps and a resignification of the cityscape. The paper then moves on to study the works of US-Salvadoran media artist Eduardo Navas, examining how his Minima Moralia Redux recycles previous textual formats as it updates Adorno in order to bring the neoliberal, corporatist model of capitalism under scrutiny, and provides a critique of the social media platform through which it works, and the associated issues of policing and dataveillance. Both of these artists are seen as representative of a broader trend in Latin American literary and artistic projects of the resistant recycling of fragments, and the contestatory use of digital tools.
This paper proposes to explore internet-based works by Latin American artists as exemplifying approaches to contagion and containment insofar as these terms relate to social networks, technological innovations, financial contagion, and neoliberalism. The paper explores how the work of Latin(o) American digital artists allows for ways of thinking through the flows (of capital, people and goods) underpinning neoliberalism, and provides a partial contestation of neoliberalism through the very tools that are often seen to uphold it. Exploring the interface between the technological and the affective, the paper takes as case studies firstly the works of Uruguayan artist Brian Mackern, and his critique of the post-crash neoliberal era in his pieces collected in 34s56w.org, analysing how Mackern engages in the production of affective maps and a resignification of the cityscape. The paper then moves on to study the works of US-Salvadoran media artist Eduardo Navas, examining how his Minima Moralia Redux recycles previous textual formats as it updates Adorno in order to bring the neoliberal, corporatist model of capitalism under scrutiny, and provides a critique of the social media platform through which it works, and the associated issues of policing and dataveillance. Both of these artists are seen as representative of a broader trend in Latin American literary and artistic projects of the resistant recycling of fragments, and the contestatory use of digital tools.
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